Beauty Looks Down on Me Read online

  3

  THE GREATEST DIFFICULTY for people who work at night is that the rhythm of their lives differs from most others. How enormous an inconvenience it is to not be part of the majority can’t be known unless it’s been experienced. Once you withdraw from the many things you’ve become accustomed to in sharing time with others, you reach a stage of calm acceptance. When I have the very rare chance, on a day other than Sunday, to wander the streets during the daytime, I feel a sense of ease at belonging, yet I still feel like an outsider.

  In the morning, when I’d usually be sleeping soundly, I arose and briefly tidied up my place. After dropping off some clothes at the cleaner’s and stopping by the bank to pay all my utility bills, I went to a mountaineering store I’d been trying to find for a few days on my way to and from work. It was close to a subway station. The owner, who at first glance was obviously a serious trekker, with his darkly-tanned face and the proudly-worn mountaineering hat pulled down low on his head, brazenly scrutinized me like I was someone who’d never been near a mountain. When I told him I was looking for a pair of hiking boots, his response, as he continued with his work, expressed his disinterest.

  “There are many kinds of hiking boots. Where are you going?”

  When I casually told him that I was headed to the Rocky Mountains in Canada, I didn’t at all expect the kind of effect my statement had.

  From then on, for almost an hour, he was oblivious to the other patrons entering and exiting the store and didn’t leave my side. Needless to say, he talked incessantly about mountains. I don’t know if he was typical of all serious mountaineers, but he was much more devoted to sharing his knowledge than to selling his goods. I was fine with his presentations on the origin of the Sierra cup, the various uses of a Nalgene container, which has such an airtight seal that it can be used to transport organs for transplant, and so on, but when he expounded on the ways to mend a torn tent, to cope with mountain sickness, to call for help in distress, to use a camping knife to disinfect a poisonous insect bite wound, and even the art of making drinking water out of urine, I couldn’t help feeling weary. I regretted that I hadn’t come with B. He didn’t have a lot of mountaineering experience, but he was pedantic and had extensive knowledge on a wide variety of subjects, and within ten minutes he’d have turned the tables and started to educate the owner.

  The equipment the owner chose for me was unexpectedly basic: a backpack, a pair of hiking boots, a sleeping bag, a small cup with a set of cutlery, and a container for kimchi, a Korean’s source of strength. “Mountaineering is the real thing your body has to deal with, so you don’t need a lot of unnecessary equipment”, he said, and then proceeded to tell me several examples of the mettle of real Korean men who had achieved their objectives through sheer audacity and resourcefulness, even in extreme situations, without depending on such things as state-of-the-art equipment. The idea struck me that he might have been in the airborne or marine corps. He may not even have been a mountain climber. According to B’s classification system, he was obviously the “old-fashioned Korean gentleman type” who “by believing the fantasy that he has no weaknesses can occasionally put himself and others in danger.”

  When I’d finished paying, the owner handed me two shopping bags and gave me a final piece of advice: “If you happen to meet a bear, don’t forget to go into taekwondo position immediately. With such a wild animal, the battle of nerves is important. If you scare it first, you’ll break its spirit and it won’t be able to attack you. I’m right, you’ll see.”

  I don’t want to see, I thought to myself.

  After I got home, I started to pack. I put some first aid stuff, including diarrhea medicine, and a thick duck down parka into my backpack and tried it on my back. I decided to wear my hiking boots when I left. I put into my shoulder bag the book by travel writer Bill Bryson that B had sent through an Internet bookstore to congratulate me on my ambitious undertaking, as I was planning to read it on the airplane. B agreed to take me to the airport. When I asked him to keep my cell phone for me while I was away, he teased me, telling me to leave my insurance policy and my bank book, and to write a will, too. I used the excuse that someone could send me a text message, as in the case of the girl who had run away from home, or that I might get an important phone call. Although I was physically departing, I wasn’t ready to travel, so I had to by any means necessary maintain a thin lifeline connecting my present with the existence that I was leaving behind. I didn’t even say a word to my parents. They wouldn’t be concerned about me if they didn’t hear from me for two weeks or so. I had to ask B to answer the phone only in the case that a call came from my parents, and for that reason I had to leave my phone charger with him, too.

  “Is that the only phone call you want me to answer?”

  I nodded in response to B’s question, although we were on the phone. “If you get a job while I’m gone,” I said, “call my cell phone and let me know right away.”

  B answered with a wisecrack. “Yeah, I’ll get a bear to tell you for me.”

  I checked my email one last time on the morning of the day I was to leave. There were two spam emails, a webzine from an insurance company, and an email from B. The title was “Evasion, or Advice for a Person Who Adapts.”

  Most people think of peace as a state of Nothing Bad Happening, or Nothing Much Happening. Yet if peace is to overtake us and make us the gift of serenity and well-being, it will have to be the state of Something Good Happening.

  - E. B. White

  I left my computer on until just before I left home, but no more emails arrived.

  4

  IN JULY OF 1983, a group of child campers led by their three teachers pitched their tents in a provincial park in Canada. At night, a 181-kilogram black bear discovered their sack of food tied up in a tree and brought it down to the ground by breaking the branch to which it was tied. When it had eaten all that, it followed the scent of chocolate bars and hamburgers and raided the tents. The sleeping children awoke and shrieked in extreme terror as they breathed their last.

  A hunter in Alaska followed a bear for several days before finally succeeding in shooting it through the heart. A moment after he leaned his rifle against a tree, the fallen bear lashed out with its claws, tearing the hunter’s face to shreds with a single stroke.

  Two teenage boys camping in America’s Yellowstone National Park unintentionally passed between a mother bear and her cub. Nothing incites a mother bear like being separated from her young. The mother bear lumbered after the boys at fifty-six kilometers per hour. The boys ran for their lives and climbed a tree, but the bear, a professional tree climber, easily followed them up and tossed them to the ground. They played dead, but it was no use. The bear gnawed on them to her heart’s content.

  The food cart with the Air Canada logo engraved on it was approaching, so I closed my book. Whether B was being sarcastic or not, I still believe that you should either climb a tree or play dead when meeting a bear. According to the mountaineering store owner’s advice, I must change the way I think and be the first to assume an attack position. But I’m not sure I could swallow my fear of bears enough to strike an aggressive pose, no matter how dangerous the situation.

  Not long ago, I saw in the news that a circus elephant, stressed out from the brutal schedule of performances, had run away. A bear, on the other hand, would never turn up in the center of a city just to get some hamburgers and chocolate bars. While aimlessly surfing the Internet, I found a series of tragic love stories about bears, in which every night a male bear leaves a private zoo to enjoy a stroll, but can’t return to his cage after a negligent security guard locks the door, leaving the female bear sad. I also came across a spring movie publicity event in which three people would be picked to receive stuffed bears the size of their boyfriends simply by participating in a survey about their impression of bears. The flight attendant was standing right next to my seat. Choosing fish over beef, I wondered which choice I’d make if I were a bear. />
  5

  ACCORDING TO THE map, Y was living in a city right along a route that passed through the Rocky Mountains. But in reality, it was a long distance from there, a full day’s driving without rest. Y stressed that he was living not on a peninsula like Korea, but in North America, a continent. “Above all,” he said, “when you see the Korean kids going to school here, you’ll think to yourself a hundred times over, I’m glad I came.” The next moment, perhaps realizing that I was a bootlicking institute instructor in the excessively competitive Korean system, he changed his tone. “But with so little stress over here, with their tension relieved, their eyes become completely glazed when they haven’t been back to Korea in a few years. You know that Korean kids have a focused look in their eyes and military-like discipline.” From the moment I met him at the airport, Y spoke often of the success stories of emigrants, and he always ended by promoting the quality of life enjoyed by people who go to live in advanced countries. But he lived in an apartment building on the outskirts of the city, so his circumstances didn’t look that good.

  There was a reason Y had told me several times to get an international driver’s license before I came. His right hand was bandaged.

  “How did that happen?”

  “I hurt it stopping a fight in a bar. I’ll have no trouble travelling, I just can’t drive or wash dishes,” he said, slapping me enthusiastically on the back with his left hand. P, our senior, had said that he was leaving early in the morning to come and join us. He appeared to be coming by train, even though by continental standards he lived close by. When Y handed me the car keys and told me that we had to go meet him at the train station, I couldn’t help asking about it.

  “He’s not coming by car?”

  “He doesn’t drive. I told you he’s a little strange.”

  I was in a bit of a daze from jet lag, and even my stomach was starting to give me trouble. But I held the steering wheel and kept my eyes wide open to accustom myself to the English road signs.

  “It’s so much more comfortable driving here in Canada where they use kilometers, instead of miles like in the United States, isn’t it?” Y hit me on the back again. “About P, he’s a little unique. Try to understand him, in spite of his peculiarities.”

  “What peculiarities?”

  “In short, he can’t adjust himself to society. Every time he fails at something, he leaves everything behind, even his family. Whether he’s a misanthrope or what, I don’t know, but he’s had psychiatric treatment. In particular, he becomes violent when drunk. Don’t drink with him.”

  I eyed the bandage on Y’s hand. “Is that how you got hurt?”

  Y mumbled something to himself as if to avoid answering my question. “He can memorize things like documents and account books in an instant. Memory, calculation, he’s really amazing at such things. An unfortunate talent, I guess. In any case, he’s not the kind of person who can live in a society like Korea’s.”

  My first impression of P was that he was unyielding and melancholy, perhaps owing to the information Y had given me about him in advance. He was very big, a full ninety kilograms at least, and he gave off the aura of one whose body was half ablaze with glowing flames and half filled with dark, flowing water. He took no notice of me at all, making it abundantly clear that he was the leader of this excursion, the one who had planned all the routes and the schedule, and that he and Y had initially planned to go by themselves.

  Our first destination was J, known as a tough part of the Rocky Mountains to explore. After surveying the rugged mountains there, we came down to B, a popular tourist spot, seeing glaciers, lakes, hot springs, and coniferous forests along the way, before finally reaching the last stop on our day’s itinerary, a small town near the border that I’d already heard about from Y. Anyway, it didn’t matter. My main concern was that only one day had passed since we’d set out on this trip. When we departed in the car, Y, sitting in the back, started chatting with P, who was in the passenger’s seat up front. I don’t know if they were in collusion with B in Korea, but their conversation was mainly about bears.

  “Bears should be hunted on downhill trails. If you kill a bear on an uphill trail, you can’t take it with you because it’s too heavy. For that reason, most expert hunters acquire the skill to take apart a bear into flesh, bones, entrails, and so on.”

  Y had even had the experience of carrying a gun along on a bear hunt. Though he’d expected a breathtaking fight like in a scene from a movie, it wasn’t like that at all. The task of hiding behind a tree and waiting motionlessly for several hours for a bear, taking care to avoid even the sound of breathing, had turned out to be an extremely calm and profound undertaking. He became keenly aware of the fact that not everyone was fortunate enough to encounter a wild animal in its natural state. He was very much looking forward to both meeting a bear and not meeting one. That is, he definitely wanted to see a bear, but it had to be from a safe distance. He’d heard a story about a bear that came into the campground of some national park and demolished thirty-six vehicles because a newlywed couple had stored their wedding cake in the trunk of their car. Though bears naturally like the smell of sweet things, they’re also fond of the scent of cosmetics and will pursue menstruating women. Their olfactory sense has evolved enough to detect prey even upwards of a kilometer away. In view of this, to take advantage of their sensitivity to smells, a bear repellant spray was developed. The safety of such a spray, however, is uncertain. Bears are curious creatures and may follow the scent even more persistently, thinking, “Where is this odor I dislike so much coming from?” Y even explained, with regard to bear paw cookery, why the right paw is tastier. When a bear opens a bee hive, it uses its right paw first, and the swarm of bees stings that paw more intensively, making the quality of meat on the right paw finer than the left.

  P hardly said a word. I looked at him out of the corner of my eye. With his head drooping slightly and his downcast eyes, he appeared to be dozing. For someone half asleep, he seemed to be holding his head rather stiff, and it wasn’t until I glanced sideways at him a few times as I held on tightly to the steering wheel that I realized what he was doing. He was looking at a map. Each and every page of the thick map resting on his lap was curled up at the end, each corner likewise severely worn. Its condition, rather than indicating its age, showed more that it was the tortured pet of its disturbed owner. It may even have been because its owner wore it out looking for directions he was never able to find. The roads weren’t even complicated enough to have to look at the map that often. On the contrary, it was a tedious route, following a highway for several hours without even having to change lanes. It was, if anything, strange for P to keep his eyes glued to the map. Ah, he’s a map addict, I thought.

  When he’d looked at the page spread out before him almost long enough to memorize every road on it, he began to flip backward and forward through the map book. With the route we’d come along so far perfectly ingrained in his mind, it appeared that he intended not to stop at that, but to completely familiarize himself with the geography within at least two thousand kilometers in all directions from our current location. He didn’t look at the outside scenery at all. His attention was focused only on estimating his present position on the map. The direction in which he was headed, his destination, and such things didn’t appear all that important to him in comparison to the task of checking his current coordinates. I wonder into which numbered type B would classify him. No matter how different and unique a person P was, B would eventually discover a category to place him in.

  It was the morning of the next day when we reached the final town before entering the district of J. As soon as we turned off of the highway, our eyes were met with beautiful snow-capped mountains continuing on without end. Since I’d been looking at the densely snow-covered scene for several hours, with the snow in layers looking like the pattern on the sides of the dark mountains of rock, I no longer thought it necessary to travel to our destination. I’d already seen t
he Rockies to the point of disliking them, and I was seriously sick and tired of driving. I stopped the car in front of a general store, and Y went in to buy some firewood, water and canned beer. I sat at an outdoor table in front of the store and lit a cigarette. The image of P browsing through an assortment of maps in a display stand next to the counter caught my eye.

  The weather was very fair. I felt like I’d entered a brightly-colored picture postcard. In the clean air, the first relaxing cigarette I’d had in a long time didn’t taste bad at all. I was looking around for a place to throw away the butt when Y approached and pointed to the garbage can with the characteristic hook hanging from it.

  “They make them like that so the bears can’t open them. Bears can’t bend their claws inward, so the lids have hooks on the inside like that.”

  Y looked excited as he took a bear repellent bell from his backpack and tied it onto the zipper of his windbreaker. He then hung a small whistle on the end of a long string around my neck and told me rather grimly that singing in a loud voice is another way to drive away a bear.

  “If you happen upon a bear, the best thing to do is pretend not to see it and keep walking. That’s what the bear wants, too. It won’t attack if you don’t provoke it. Try to go into taekwondo position or something and you’ll be dead on the spot.”

  I watched carefully as Y took his cell phone from his pocket. I felt uneasy when he eventually turned it off, saying that there was no longer a signal. When I called Korea the night before, B informed me that my cell phone hadn’t rung once.

  “Everyone knows that you left on a trip.”

  But his words weren’t very comforting. Overhearing my conversation with B, Y asked sarcastically, “You still call your friends first whenever something happens?”